Amos Oz has no alternative in his novels but to tell us what it means to be an Israeli. The Hill of Evil Counsel is a trio of interlinked narratives set in Jerusalem at the time just before the founding of the Israeli state. The third story—"Longing"—is told in the form of letters from a bacteriologist to a woman doctor in New York….

Oz is a writer of great humanity and sensitivity. He conveys with a kind of light exactitude the atmosphere of the time; the physical feel of the town, and above all the consciousness of his narrator correspondent, and his reluctance to lose the Europeanness which is all he has, and the modes of understanding that go with it…. So effectively skillful and tactful is the composition that its symbolic overtones are only present in a complex mixture of excitement and disquiet, just as...